The Ruling Elites Put Democracy under Duress in Indonesia – and the People are fighting back

Police violence against recent protests by civil society groups and social movements marks the biggest challenge for Indonesia’s Prabowo administration and tests the Indonesian political class’ commitment to democracy. In this blog Iqra Anugrah and Rachma Lutfiny Putri explain how Oligarchic agendas of the elites have led to disastrous policy choices, triggering the protest movement. Progressive politics, despite its lack of leadership and clear ideology and platform, should maintain this momentum by defending itself from state repression and forcing elite concessions.

Recent anti-oligarchic protests across Indonesia have presented the biggest political challenge to the Prabowo administration since it took power in 2024. Repressive handling of the protests by the Indonesian police, which resulted in the martyrdom of Affan Kurniawan, a motorcycle taxi driver, and nine others along with the arrest of 3,337 protesters triggered a protest movement to spread like wildfire. All of this has happened in less than a year after Prabowo’s inauguration as president.

The gruesome nature of Affan’s death significantly raised political consciousness of the movement and the general public, but the collective anger behind it has been simmering for a while. Like other authoritarian populists, Prabowo had pursued a series of questionable policies prone to elite hijacking and rent-seeking, such as the Free Nutritious Meal programme and the Danantara sovereign wealth fund. But the causes for the recent protests were something more structural and paradigmatic: increasing inequality and precariousness, shrinking ‘middle class,’ growing military role in politics, and crackdown on democratic dissent. These were exacerbated by the contempt of several members of the parliament (MPs) toward the plight of the working people and the proposal to raise their allowances amidst economic hardship.

By the time of this writing, the clashes between the state and the movements had entered a period of protracted de-escalation. With the exception of some young liberal influencers who naively entered an appeasement dialogue with a few MPs, labor unions, women’s movements, and student activist groups still continue their grassroots advocacy and popular education works, while the police continue to detain those arrested.

Concrete policy shifts after this crisis are still unclear. Aside from the cancellation of the proposed housing allowance raise for MPs, the government has yet to meet other crucial demands: ending police violence, reducing excessive allowances for MPs and high-ranking officials, and addressing labor demands concerning fair wage and employment relations.

Deepening illiberal and authoritarian practices under Prabowo presidency suggest the limits of a democratic façade to oligarchic politics. This propelled widespread response from a broad alliance of grassroots social movements supported by the public and piggybacked by liberal-leaning groups and influencers. The ruling elites made only limited concessions to popular demands, while divisions between grassroots bases and liberal networks show how fragmented the civil society remains. The future will remain uncertain and bleak, but grassroots social movements can break this impasse by exercising their leadership and mobilizational power to force further elite concessions.

Drivers of the protests: the changing contour of oligarchic politics

The shift to a more brazen display of authoritarian politics in Indonesian democracy is not merely a product of changing elite political culture, but a logical consequence of the transformation of mechanisms of oligarchic extraction in the interests of the ruling class and the bourgeois state. At the international level, Indonesian economic and political elites try to tap into profits offered by the booming nickel industry. Domestically, these oligarchic elites have expanded their extraction targets from traditional sectors (e.g., land and coal resources) to ‘white elephant’ projects most notoriously the construction of the new capital city.

As detailed by the People’s Liberation Party, this heavy strain on the state budget is further compounded by the ambition of Prabowo, himself a top member of the oligarchic elites, to implement his flagship Free Nutritious Meal  programme, which has been poorly implemented, and increase military spending. This forced the central government to slash transfer funds for regional governments by 50 per cent in 2025. In turn, many local governments significantly raised property taxes, with some raising them by over 100 per cent.

These policies prompted various mass protests since the beginning of Prabowo’s tenure, ranging from anti-government protests in various cities to the famous anti-tax protest in Pati, Central Java, which forced the district head of Pati to resign.

Unsurprisingly, it becomes imperative for the ruling elites to further constrain democratic spaces to defend their interests. The tragic death of Affan, the excessive use of state violence, and the political elites’ lukewarm response to this crisis are clear signs of this development.

 

The nature of the protest coalition: Fragmentation amidst rising political consciousness

Responding to this elite assault, a series of protests started in late August. Of particular interest were the protests in Jakarta on August 28, the day Affan was martyred. They shared the same anti-government sentiment but differed in their policy demands and compositions of protest coalitions. Four participating groups can be identified:

1) labor unions, whose demands centered around wage increase and job security,

2) broad people’s coalition for climate justice consisting of farmers, fishers, grassroots women’s movements, and urban poor organizations,

3) student activists who rejected the proposed housing and other allowances raise for the MPs, and

4) motorcycle taxi drivers, whose mobilization intensified after the police’s armored vehicle ran over Affan.

These four groups, in varying degrees, continued their protests after Affan’s tragic death and intensifying police violence.

Afterwards, the coalitions and support for the protesters gained broad public support. Public jubilation and awe when witnessing the looting of the houses of problematic MPs, most notoriously the suspended MP Ahmad Sahroni, indicated the culmination of their collective anger.

But this brief period of political joy was punctuated by arson cases targeting public infrastructure in Jakarta such as bus stops and an optical server box, a pattern that spread to other cities. While there is a strong possibility that factions of the competing elites were behind these provocations, one should keep in mind that the youth participating in these urban riots saw their act as one of defiance and, we would add, protest against the sanctification of wealth and private properties of the elites.

These chaotic events, followed by increasing repression and control by the police and armed forces, led to the reappearance of a familiar trope in Indonesian politics: the dichotomy between peaceful and ‘anarchistic’ protesters. While we remain cognizant of elite manipulation behind these events and the excesses of street protests, we reject such dichotomy. Such as a false dichotomy, in our view, is cynically deployed by the ruling elites and the state to tame people’s militancy and divide the public. Further, as the case of violent attacks against student protesters resting at safe zones at Bandung Islamic University and Pasundan University showed, the police and armed forces have a long record of using the false dichotomy as a pretext to curb freedom of assembly and speech of dissident and marginalized groups.

As this chaos subsided, the latter phase of the protests witnessed the emergence of liberal influencers as accidental torchbearers of the movement. Political scientist Edward Aspinall argued that the proponents of this not-so-new counterculture of protest are student executive councils, unions and NGOs. His comprehensive analysis misses one new actor: liberal influencers with links to consultancy and ‘hip’ online media industries. Deliberately intervening into the ongoing dynamics, they summarized organic programmatic demands from various working-class and popular organizations into a laundry list of demands called the ‘17+8’ demands (a catchy reference to the Indonesian date of independence, 17 August).

While we recognize the value of such campaigns and their impact on raising political awareness among the urban middle class, we doubt their claims about actual campaign reach and policy impacts. We also criticize the inherent class bias and celebrity culture in their methods of activism which unfortunately sideline the role and agendas of actual working-class bases and organizations — groups whose agency played a key role in advancing the political aims of the protests and yet remains nameless and unseen. This attitude is emblematic of the cultural and political outlooks of the liberal/critical sections of the professional managerial class in Indonesia.

Our informal conversation with working-class activists involved in the protests and grassroots collectives reveal their anger and criticism toward the liberals. The main problem with liberal activism, in their view, is the lack of stronger labor and class demands and the dominance of liberal aesthetics and voice at the expense of aspirations and experiences of the most marginalized. From our conversation with them, we learned that the sacrifice of working-class activists at the frontline of the protests, including a dozen of ordinary labor and rural activists from our own personal networks detained or charged as provocateurs by the police, features mostly as statistics in mainstream media rather than stories of pro-democracy heroism.

Like their previous predecessors, liberal influencers are ‘floating’, divorced from the lived experience and consciousness of the masses. This detachment reveals a long-standing fault line in Indonesian civil society: between liberal and progressive–radical activism.

 

Take-away points

It is still too early to assess the impact and legacy of the 2025 protests, but we would like to highlight three important take-away points.

First, both ‘spontaneity’ and ‘leadership’ in mass movements are not opposites, but rather essential parts in a process to consolidate democratic leadership and institutionalization of social movements. As Rosa Luxemburg once reminded us, social reforms and spontaneity mobilized the oppressed, but revolutionary collectivity is mandatory to make their gains last.

Second, reflecting on the severity of state repression in recent protests, we reaffirm the right of the protesters to defend themselves against state violence through peaceful, and, under severe circumstances, disruptive methods. Our argument is not a provocation of violence but rather a view backed by research. A rigorous study has shown that disruptive actions by nonelites drive democratic deepening. Street protests and their dynamics are indeed the bloodlines of democracy.

Lastly, given the lack of success of the liberal influencers’ lobbying effort with the parliament, it is high time for grassroots working-class organizations to mobilize again. Only their leadership and political power can break this impasse.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

 

Disclaimer and acknowledgement: We maintain an active engagement with Indonesian social movements and our works since 2015 can be verified with various organizations, communities, and individuals that we have been working with. Currently we are conducting field research in Indonesia as Visiting Researchers at Agrarian Resource Center (ARC). In particular, we would like to thank our comrades at Progressive Islam Forum (FIP) and Kolektif SULU for insightful discussions on recent developments with them.

About the authors:

Iqra Anugrah is a Trapezio MSCA Seal of Excellence Fellow at the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Modern Cultures at the University of Turin. He holds affiliate positions at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) at Leiden University and the Institute for Economic and Social Research, Education, and Information (LP3ES) in Jakarta. His current project examines multi-strand conservatism in Indonesia.

 

Rachma Lutfiny Putri is a Wenner-Gren Wadsworth International Fellow and a PhD candidate at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam and a Visiting Fellow at Populi Center. Her interests include urban anthropology, value chain, informal work, and development studies.

 

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